My best friend Susie the beagle has been deceased for four days now -- and I really lost her six days ago when she had 10 to 12 seizures.
Watching my best friend die in front of me is something I will never get out of my mind. Watching two hospitals dump her like trash out of their medical operation area back into the waiting room instead of trying to revive her because I couldn’t pay thousands of dollars immediately is something I will never get out of my mind.
My article on what happened that last day has been written and posted on my Facebook page. It names the names of the vile and despicable people who wouldn’t treat her, but I’m unsure whether to post it on someone else’s blog like on Storeboard.
For this blog, I am going to try to remember the good times -- and what I miss about her.
Susie and I met in 2004. I had decided to go to graduate school and save money by moving from an expensive apartment into a house owned by a friend who needed money for a downpayment and was looking at a house with two separate entrances. My side of the house was just as big as my apartment and he was going to charge me a fraction of the rent I was paying.
As I began to move in some of my property through the back yard, I opened the gate. A beagle ran out. And ran. And ran. And ran. I didn’t know my friend had a dog. I learned later that the dog had just been given to him, and his 9-year-old son, by a friend as a housewarming gift a few days earlier. I learned later that the dog’s background was a mystery. She was estimated to be three to five years old -- and had been named Bubbles until the boy named her Susie.
My friend and I chased the beagle for at least half an hour through the neighborhood before we corralled it. That’s how I met Susie.
About two months later, I saw Susie in the back yard day after day as thunderstorms ravaged the area. She was scared. I phoned my friend and asked him why she was in the back yard during storms. He said his wife didn’t want a dog in the house.
Angry, I moved Susie into my house. She spent our entire first night trying to hop into my bed. I kept chasing her out. She kept hopping back in. She won. She spent the next 10 years in my bed, often lying on top of me as I slept. Susie was my dog unofficially that night, officially a few months later.
It’s 4:30 a.m. now. I can’t sleep. I’ve never been a good sleeper. Susie didn’t help because she snored like an old man for the first four years I had her. That’s one of the things I will miss about her. To listen to a tiny dog sound like an old man was disconcerting at first, but it was one of the things that made her distinctive. In 2008, Susie began having nasal problems and the loud snoring went away, replaced by snorting and reverse sneezing. I wish I could hear that disturbing noise right now. It’s too quiet.
And I missed her howling. Susie hated being alone. When she was, she howled. And howled. And howled. My friend could hear her on the other side of the house. And she would fight like mad to get out of the house, scratching the door and walls to get out. I eventually Susieproofed the house.
I turned Susie’s howling into singing. I wrote a song about her and at the appropriate moments she would let out a long howl. She largely stopped doing that after 2008, but I tried for the next six years to get her to relive her youth.
Susie loved food. Beagles eat everything. She wouldn’t fetch, but I wanted her to be playful. I figured out at some point that if I put food in a ball with a hole in it, she would chase that ball for hours, pushing that ball until food came out. OK, generally she somehow figured out how to get the food out in seconds, but I would put more food into it and the whole routine would take hours.
When the food was in my hands, Susie would sit down without my asking her to and start giving paws, first left, then right, without me saying a word, even when I was too far away to shake her paws.
And I’ll never forget our “walks.” For exercise, I had to take my own walks, solo, because Susie wasn’t a fast walker. She sniffed everything, turning a 10-minute walk into a 45-minute walk with 10 minutes of actual walking and 35 minutes of sniffing. Mostly, she sniffed for food. I don’t know what she was eating when she found something, but usually trying to get the junk out of her mouth was pointless.
Sometimes, though, at a park nearby in Indiana, she sniffed more than food. She sniffed rabbits. Rabbits made Susie crazy. The noise she made when she smelled a rabbit could be heard by everyone near the nearby school. She sounded like a dog who was being abused by her companion, but she wasn’t. People stared at me as if I was doing something wrong. I wasn’t. Susie yanked me all over the place as she traced the smell. A few times, she saw a rabbit. I don’t know how I held onto her. Thirty minutes after the rabbit was gone, she was still yanking me.
I will miss how excited she got before each walk, running around our back yard in Illinois in circles for several minutes as soon as I let her out of the door. By the time, I caught up to her to begin our walk via leaving the back yard gate, she was already tired.
I will miss how excited she got when I came home, again racing around the back yard since I left her outside in good weather because of the howling and scratching problems that I mentioned earlier. She was extremely fast -- and extremely lovable.
In recent years, I have been unable to care for her properly, but Susie never complained as we moved from place to place. I’ve felt guilty without a back yard, guilty she couldn’t express her personality as fully as she once did.
I have so much more to write, but it will have to wait for another column. I wish you were here Susie, I wish you had lived a very long life instead of the reasonably long life you lived. I will always feel guilty that I couldn’t provide the best for you in recent years, but you always provided the best companionship for me. I have been looking at photos I took of you for the past six days. You will always be with me.
And I will try to honor your memory by exposing the people who refused to try to save a defenseless little animal because their Daddy didn’t have thousands of dollars in his pocket. Rest in peace.
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